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the muru party moved to the attack. Mawca met them with several vigorous blows, and they drew back, pretending to be very much hurt. Then a dozen others rushed forward with solid clubs and felled the young chief to the ground. When they had finished with him, he lay bathed in blood and almost insensible. Stripping off his clothes as part of their plunder, they ran into the house and sacked it from top to bottom, after which they set it on fire and stood by until it was totally consumed. Then breaking down the fences and smashing gates, to complete their work of destruction, they shouldered their newly acquired property and marched away, leaving their victim naked and bleeding where he had fallen. An hour or so later, when Mawea had revived sufficiently to re alize how greatly he had been honored, a neighbor who had come up remarked, "This is a very bad work indeed." "Bad," said he, " no, no! very, very good work. You must remember I had a very bad wife. ' One of the last cases of muruing was the following, in which the culprit seems to have gotten the benefit of both the old order of things and the new. A chief stole a pair of scissors from a pakeha and was tried by a magistrate and sent to jail for fourteen days. His neighbors were offended at this, deeming that the punishment overmatched the crime. In their view the unmerited ignominy which was thus cast upon the prisoner could only be expiated by a muru. Accordingly, after

notifying the chief's wife, they murued his estate in a most complete and complimentary manner. " Thus," remarks the original nar rator, humorously, " thus was the heart of that captive chief made glad in the loneliness of his prison cell, by the thought that, in his absence, his friends would not permit his affairs to suffer from neglect." Concerning the passing of this singular Maori law, Judge Maning, who spent many years in New Zealand, wrote in the early sixties as follows : " I think the reason that the muru is so much less practiced than for merly, is the fact that the natives are now better supplied with the necessaries and comforts of life than they were many years ago, especially iron tools and utensils; and in consequence the temptation to plunder is proportionately decreased. When I first saw the natives, the chance of getting an axe or a spade by the summary process of muru, or — at a still more remote period — a few wooden implements or a canoe, was so great a temptation, that the lucky possessor was continually watched by many eager and ob servant eyes, in hopes to pick a hole in his coat, by which the muru might be legally brought to bear upon him. I say legally, for the natives always tried to have a suffi cient excuse; and I absolutely declare, odd as it may seem, that actual, unauthorized, and inexcusable robbery or theft was less frequent than in any country I have ever been in, though the temptation to steal was a thousandfold greater."